Introduction to Photoshop 7.0

Introduction

Photoshop is a very large and intimidating program at
first glance. However, after using it for a while, you'll
quickly discover that there are only a handful of features
that you'll use all the time. This tutorial walks you
through the most important features of Photoshop so
you can get started using it. Most of what is covered
here should work fine in almost all versions of Photoshop
from 5.0 through the future.

The Tutorial

Opening Images

Opening an image in Photoshop is just like with any
other application. By selecting "File | Open..." on the
menu, you'll get the familiar File Open dialog where you
can search for your files and open them. Note that you
can also open more than one file by Ctrl-Selecting files,
or Shift-Selecting to select a range of files. Play
around a bit in here to get used to that.

To keep yourself from damaging your original digicam
files, it is a really good idea to only work on copies of
those original files. Keep your originals in a separate
"safe"
folder on your hard drive, and copy them to a working
folder where you can mess with them. There's nothing
worse than finding out you've just destroyed your
original digicam image.

Cropping

The Crop tool lets you cut off unwanted portions of
an image. Select the crop tool, then click and drag
out a rectangle on your image. You can adjust the
rectangle by clicking and dragging the little squares at the
corners. You can also rotate the rectangle by clicking
and dragging outside the rectangle. This lets you
straighten a slightly crooked image.

Resizing

Once the image is cropped to your satisfaction, you
have to decide whether or not you want to print this
image. If you want to make a large print of the image,
do not resize
it, leave it at its original size. This gives the
printer (or print service) a lot of resolution to work
with, which results in a nicer print.

If, however, your goal is to create an image that
will only be viewed on the screen, or that you will
only send in email, you can resize the image to be
more appropriate for those goals. My preferred tool
for doing this is "Fit Image". In the menu, select
"File | Automate | Fit Image...".

For screen viewing,
I set both width and height to 800 and press ok.
This gives me an image that looks fine on the screen,
and is also suitable for printing a 4x6. For sending
in email, I might use 400 for both the width and height.
This gives a much smaller file that won't bog down
your or the recipient's email.

Older versions of Photoshop do not have "Fit Image",
so you have to use the "Image | Image Size..." dialog
which can be very confusing.
Let me know
if you are
interested in an upgrade to this tutorial to include
that.

Levels

The last step before saving is to check the brightness
and contrast of the image. The most important tool to
learn first is "Levels". From the menu, select
"Image | Adjustments | Levels...". This brings
up the Levels dialog:

This one dialog lets you make all sorts of changes
to your image. For this tutorial we are going to focus
on getting the contrast right. The graph that you see in
the upper portion of the Levels dialog is called the
"Histogram". It is a count of the number of points in
an image that are a certain brightness. The x-axis
of the histogram goes from black on the left to white
on the right. You can see on the histogram above that
this particular image has values that range from full
black all the way up to full white. Because of this,
there is probably little we can do to improve the
whites and blacks in this image. However, take
a look at the following histogram:

This graph does not spread all the way from full
black to full white. As a result the image will have
low contrast.

To fix this, we use the small triangle controls
under the graph to adjust the "white point" and
"black point".

First, we adjust the white point by grabbing the
white point triangle and dragging it to the right edge
of the graph:

Next, we adjust the black point by grabbing the
black point triangle and dragging it to the left
edge of the graph:

Now that we have optimized the white and black points,
we can try playing with the middle control which is called
the "gamma" control. With it you can adjust the overall
contrast of the image to taste.

Saving

Now it's time to save the image. Most likely you will
want to save photographs in JPEG format. Just be sure to
use "File | Save As..." and
rename the file so you don't clobber your original digicam
JPEG file. That would be very bad. Given the original
image from the digicam, you can go through this process
again and perhaps prepare an image for some other purpose,
like printing an 8x10.

In addition to always working with copies of
the original files, I always use "File | Save As.."
which will warn me if I'm about to write over the original
file. I give the processed version a slightly
different name by adding a "2" to the end of the filename.
This keeps me from clobbering the originals. Since
I always work with copies, I now have to clean up any
duplicate copies that are laying around.

It's amazing how complicated loading and saving
the files can be.

Conclusion

What I've presented here is an abbreviated version of
my own photo retouching process. Spend some time
practicing this process on your own images.
Once you get used to
doing all this, you can move on to my
full retouching tutorial
and get a feel for more of what Photoshop is really
capable of.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that these
are your images and the above process is intended to
teach you how to use the tools Photoshop provides. Your
goal is to make your images look good to you.